CES 2013: Acer Iconia B1: A cheap 7-inch tablet to fight the Nexus 7

CES 2013: Acer Iconia B1: A cheap 7-inch tablet to fight the Nexus 7

1:58 /
January 14, 2013

More and more cheap 7-inch tablets are springing up to combat Google's tablet -- we take a look at Acer's effort.

-Hello, I'm Luke Westaway for CNET here at CES 2013.
I'm taking a look at the Acer Iconia B1.
This is an extremely cheap Android tablet to compete with the likes of the Google Nexus 7. So, let's take a look.
So, this is a 7-inch tablet.
It's got a 7-inch display with 1024 x 768 pixel resolution.
It's not the brightest, clearest screen I've ever seen, but do bear in mind that this is a very cheap device.
I mean, it looks pretty good.
Powering it is a 1.2 gigahertz dual core chip.
Now, that's not as powerful as the quad-core fad that you will find Google 7-inch tablet, but it feels responsive enough.
I think the web browsing, things like e-mail, this would probably be fast enough.
There's 8 gigabytes of on board storage.
If doesn't enough capacity for you, then you can beef it up using a micro SD card.
It weighs 380 g. It certainly feels very portable.
But then on its side, you can see it's quite slim.
It does only come in this blue color though, so you better make sure you like blue before you buy it 'cause it is quite blue.
On the software side, we're dealing with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
That's not quite the latest, latest version that you'd find on the Nexus 7 for example, but it is a very raw version of Android, so there's an awful lot of Acer meddling going on here.
It tells me that really the only thing it's done is to think here a little bit with some notification menus.
All good so far, but now for the bad news, this tablet isn't coming out in the U.S. at the moment.
It's gonna be coming in Europe and Latin America costing 99 pounds or 119 euros
That equate to roughly $160.
But as I say, it's not coming to the States yet.
Fingers crossed Acer changes his mind on that one.
So my impressions are that is not quite as sleek as the Nexus 7, but then is a bit cheaper so that's exactly the trade off you're getting.
I'm really, really please though that we're seeing more and more cheap, decent Android tablets flood in the market.
It can only be a good thing.
I'm Luke Westaway for CNET and this is the Acer Iconia B1.